Notes on Henry Jenkins‘ essay, ‘Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.”
Key words and Concepts:
- fan appropriation
- amateur video democratizes the means of cultural production
- grassroots archiving, annotation, appropriation, and recirculation of media content
- ‘the current trend within the entertainment industry has been toward the increased concentration of media ownership into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of transmedia and transnational conglomerates’
- Participatory culture = the new style of consumerism (‘the right to participate in the creation and distribution of media narratives’)
- ‘Media consumers want to become media producers, while media producers want to maintain their traditional dominance over media content.’
- ‘The Industrial Revolution resulted in the privatization of culture and the emergence of a concept of intellectual property that assumes that cultural value originates from the original contributions of individual authors.’
- ‘The ability of corporations to control their “intellectual property” has had a devastating impact upon the production and circulation of cultural materials, meaning that the general population has come to see themselves primarily as consumers of — rather than participants within — their culture.’
- ‘we have lost the possibility for cultural myths to accrue new meanings and associations over time, resulting in single authorized versions (or at best, corporately controlled efforts to rewrite and ‘update’ the myths of our popular heroes).’
- ‘new structures of ownership diminish our ability to participate in the creation and interpretation of that culture.’
- Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Patricia R. Zimmerman ‘concludes, “[Amateur film] was gradually squeezed into the nuclear family. Technical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby.” Writing in the early 1990s, Zimmerman saw little reason to believe that the camcorder and the VCR would significantly alter this situation, suggesting that the medium’s technical limitations made it hard for amateurs to edit their films and that the only public means of exhibition were controlled by commercial media-makers.’
- ‘Scholars and critics writing about third world filmmaking have productively described those films as an “imperfect cinema,” noting the ways that filmmakers have had to deal with low budgets and limited access to high tech production facilities, making it impossible to compete with Hollywood on its own terms. Instead, these filmmakers have made a virtue out of their limitations, often spoofing or parodying Hollywood genre conventions and stylistic norms through films that are intentionally crude or ragged in style.’
- amateur filmmakers ‘parody is almost always affectionate and rarely attempts to make an explicit political statement.’ — this is no longer true
- ‘amateur filmmakers see themselves as actively promoting media texts that they admire’
- ‘We are witnessing the emergence of an elaborate feedback loop between the emerging “DIY” aesthetics of participatory culture and the mainstream industry.’
- Conculsion: ‘We are witnessing the transformation of amateur film culture from a focus on home movies toward a focus on public movies, from a focus on local audiences toward a focus on a potential global audience, from a focus on mastering the technology toward a focus on mastering the mechanisms for publicity and promotion, and from a focus on self-documentation toward a focus on an aesthetic based on appropriation, parody, and the dialogic.’
- ‘This third space will survive, however, only if we maintain a vigorous and effective defense of the principle of “fair use,” only if we recognize the rights of consumers to participate fully, actively, and creatively within their own culture, and only if we hold in check the desires of the culture industries to tighten their control over their own intellectual property in response to the economic opportunities posed by an era of media convergence. At the moment, we are on a collusion course between a new economic and legal culture which encourages monopoly power over cultural mythologies and new technologies which empower consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media images.’
